It's sad to see Paul locked in a death-struggle with the
demon of sin. Jesus never talks about sin that way, in the authentic passages.
Sin and guilt are such terribly inefficient concepts in spiritual practice:
mostly dead weight, excrescences of the image of God as a harsh father. It is
much simpler to see things done shoddily or harmfully as mistakes, grave
mistakes perhaps, but actions arising out of our ignorance, greed, and hatred,
and correctable, transformable, with enough sincere effort. The original
meaning of to sin in Hebrew is "to miss the mark"; it has nothing
metaphysical about it. And the sins I commit against others ultimately derive
from the sin I commit against myself: I think myself down into a petty,
unworthy, miserable creature and lose sight of my original magnificence. As
for a sin against God, there is no such thing. Do the clouds sin against the
sunlight?

Stephen Mitchell - The Gospel According to Jesus

(What is sin?)

The various traditions give many answers to this question,
but they all essentially come down to this: I cannot perceive my own true
identity, or my union with Spirit, because my awareness is clouded and
obstructed by a certain activity that I am now engaged in. And that activity,
although known by many different names, is simply the activity of contracting
and focusing awareness on my individual self or personal ego. My awareness is
not open, relaxed, and God-centered, it is closed, contracted, and
self-centered. And precisely because I am identified with the self-contraction
to the exclusion of everything else, I can't find or discover my prior
identity, my true identity, with the All. My individual nature, "the
natural man," is thus fallen, or lives in sin and separation and
alienation from Spirit and from the rest of the world. I am set apart and
isolated from the world "out there," which I perceive as if it were
entirely external and alien and hostile to my own being. And as for my own
being itself, it certainly does not seem to be one with the All, one with
everything that exists, one with infinite spirit; rather, it seems completely
boxed up and imprisoned in this isolated wall of mortal flesh.

TKW: "This situation is often called dualism, isn't
it?"

KW: Yes, that's right. I split myself as
"subject" apart from the world of "objects" out there, and
then based upon this original dualism, I continue to split the world into all
sorts of conflicting opposites: pleasure versus pain, good versus evil, true
versus false, and so on. And according to the perennial philosophy, awareness
dominated by the self-contradiction, by the subject/object dualism, cannot
perceive reality as it is, reality in its wholeness, reality as the Supreme
Identity. Sin, in other words, is the self-contraction, the separate-self
sense, the ego. Sin is not something the self does, it is something the self
is.